Back in May 2005, CIO profiled the tales of two very different cities that had bought into the same municipal Wi-Fi vision: Chaska, Minn., population 18,000, and Philadelphia, population 1.5 million. The respective journeys of these two municipalities are representative of municipal Wi-Fi’s many struggles to propagate across America.

Chaska was hailed by CIO and many media outlets as a municipality that had found great success with its townwide Wi-Fi effort. For just $15.95 a month, residents received high-speed wireless access to the Internet, five e-mail accounts and 10MB of Web space. Bradley Mayer, Chaska’s IS manager at the time and a budding muni Wi-Fi celebrity, told CIO: “We knew how to do a low-cost broadband connection to business, so we thought we'd leverage what we knew” about Wi-Fi. The service was growing in popularity among Chaska residents, and the police department was set to use the wireless network. Life was good in rural Chaska.

In Philadelphia, the picture wasn’t as tranquil. What started off as a noble civic gesture to provide Internet access (at a discounted rate to low-income families) turned into a hotly debated battle between the city and Verizon and Comcast, which opposed the large Wi-Fi hot zone. Unfair competition and a taxpayer boondoggle were often reported by the telecommunications, cable and Internet access providers. Lawsuits were threatened. Life was testy in the big city.

Since then, muni Wi-Fi gained a significant amount of traction and popularity in U.S. cities big and small. Numerous projects were in the works, press releases issued, commissions formed. Many politicians allied themselves with this constituent-friendly initiative. A 2005 Wi-Fi report by the New Millennium Research Council noted that more than 200 U.S. cities were considering, testing or building municipal broadband networks at the time. The report concluded, however, that these Wi-Fi municipal networks would not sustain themselves, would increase taxpayer burden and hurt existing DSL and cable providers. In addition, the authors found “questionable assertions regarding the ‘build it and they will come’ claim, since economic development is not perceived as a guaranteed result of municipal Wi-Fi deployment.

“The experience with municipal Wi-Fi networks to date has been long on hyperbole and short on quantifiable data,” the report stated.

By late 2005, ISP EarthLink emerged as a serious player in the muni wireless arena. It inked deals to build wireless networks for Philadelphia (Verizon and Comcast eventually dropped their resistance to Philadelphia’s plans), New Orleans and several California cities: Anaheim, Milpitas, Pasadena and San Francisco. Its mission was to use wireless technology to bridge the digital divide in many communities. “The EarthLink solution will enable low-cost broadband access, at rates expected to be below $20 per month,” EarthLink states on its website. “In addition, EarthLink is working with cities to address their specific needs by exploring subsidized access that can be offered at drastically reduced prices.”